SaaS: Killer Platforms

“You have to move from being a killer app to a killer platform” said Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff.  The Spreadsheet was the first ‘Killer App’, and now Salesforce has spun off their Apex SaaS environment, something they’re calling a ‘killer platform’. 

Salesforce.com validated the SaaS model by creating their successful web-based on-demand CRM offering.  Salesforce is doing well with more than $495 million in annual revenue, 27.100 customers and 500 applications that have been integrated with Saleforce and are available in their AppExchange directory.  They predict 45% growth in 2007 to $720 million.  One example of Salesforce’s growth is a significant win they had by signing up 15,000 users at Cisco Systems.  They’ve also announced that they’ve brought on board Peter Coffee from eWeek to become the Director of Platform Research.

Last week at Apex Day in San Francisco, Salesforce launched an upgraded and expanded platform that they are calling Apex.  Apex introduces a developer environment that allows ISVs and partners to create extensions and add-ons within Salesforce that run natively on the Salesforce servers.  The goal for Salesforce is to move beyond CRM and to provide a general-purpose delivery platform for SaaS.  Apex is a step in that direction, but most of the buzz at Apex Day still centered around how to build out extensions to Salesforce’s CRM.

The base Salesforce platform is built on Java and Oracle database.  The new development environment is called Apex, and provides a protected layer of development which includes the Java-like Apex programming language and SOQL (Sforce Object Query Language), a SQL-like language for database interactions.  Apex looks cool, and at least for small-scale Visual-Basic like scripting of Salesforce extensions, it looks quite powerful. 

But the cavaet is that Apex is proprietary and forces lock-in with Salesforce.  Existing Java/SQL code can’t easily be ported to the Salesforce environment without a significant rewrite.  And at least with this first release, it isn’t clear how well Apex can support the processes needed for developing and maintaining the code base of a large application.

It may be premature to call Salesforce Apex the ‘killer platform’, but if Salesforce can keep up their current momentum and vision, it may happen.